Reflections from Inbound 2025: Marketing is a Video Game And I've Been Training Since I Was 10

I just returned from HubSpot's Inbound 2025 conference in San Francisco, and I have to say - I've never been more excited about marketing. In fact, one of the speakers, Eric Siu, perfectly captured what I've been feeling when he said that "the future of marketing is going to look like a video game."

Apparently, all those hours I spent gaming since I was 10 years old weren't wasted time - they were career preparation. My wife is going to be thrilled to learn that my current Madden Franchises are professional development for me, not just developing my fictional video game quarterback. Seriously, I'm working!

What Eric was describing resonates deeply with how I see the transformation happening in our industry. He talked about having multiple "instances" running simultaneously - one SEO employee, one analytics employee, one CRO employee - not humans, but all powered by AI agents working together while you orchestrate from above. It's like managing a complex strategy game where each unit has specialized skills, and your job is to coordinate them effectively.

The Great Transformation is Here

The conference made one thing crystal clear that's hopefully been obvious to you already: everything is changing, and it's changing fast. From Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, we learned that "the most dangerous thing for you and your company is losing your curiosity." He emphasized that winning teams are the most curious ones - those who ask the most questions rather than just accepting the status quo.

This hit home for me because at Sentry, we see this every day. Businesses are grappling with technological changes they don't fully understand, and many are paralyzed by the fear of making the wrong move.

The Death of Traditional Marketing Funnels

The old linear model of marketing- where marketing generates leads, hands them to SDRs, who then create pipeline - is broken. As one presenter put it, "our ability to hit our pipeline target has been fully dependent on this human function of sales development reps" - a bottleneck that's expensive, slow, and limited in capacity.

The average SDR can only work 250 leads per month and costs about $75,000 to employ. Meanwhile, 78% of buyers go with the vendor that responds first. The math simply doesn't work anymore.

The solution? Agentic marketing - using AI agents that can work 24/7, handle unlimited conversations simultaneously, and respond instantly. 

The New Rules of AI-Powered Content

The content game has completely changed too. Neil Patel shared insights about what he calls "search everywhere optimization" - the reality that we're no longer just optimizing for Google. "YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Reddit is getting a lot of credit... as the number one cited source on LLMs."

The data backs this up: Reddit accounts for 40.1% of citations in large language models, followed by Wikipedia at 26.3% and YouTube at 23.5%. Traditional SEO isn't dead, but it's no longer enough.

What's particularly fascinating is how AI is changing conversion rates. Multiple studies showed that traffic from AI sources converts 4-23 times higher than traditional Google organic traffic. Why? Because when people interact with AI, they're having longer, more detailed conversations - they're doing more research and arriving more qualified.

The Power of Personalization at Scale

One of the most mind-blowing demonstrations came from HubSpot's email team. They showed how AI can create truly personalized emails by ingesting unstructured data - not just first name and company, but a person's entire interaction history, website activity, and company context.

The results speak for themselves: 45% improvement in conversion rates by adding AI personalization to emails. One experiment saw a 200% increase when they included chat conversation transcripts in the AI personalization.

As one presenter noted, this isn't just about efficiency - it's about creating emails that "feel like they could only be written for that individual contact, because, in truth, they were."

Loop Marketing: The New Framework

HubSpot introduced their new "Loop Marketing" framework to replace the linear inbound methodology. The four stages - Express, Tailor, Amplify, and Evolve - represent a more dynamic, adaptive approach that matches today's complex buyer journeys.

The key insight? "People used to just move in straight lines, and now we see they're doing all sorts of things. They're going in places and ways that you didn't necessarily expect or plan for."

The Curiosity Advantage

One of the most profound insights came from Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, who spoke about curiosity as the ultimate competitive advantage. He shared how three engineers out of 700,000 in the telephone industry invented the transistor simply by asking, "Is there a way to do something better?"

His point resonated deeply: "Progress has always been made by people who are curious and didn't take things for granted and always kept asking, What if there's a better way?"

What This Means for Businesses

Here's what struck me most about the conference: even in a room full of marketing professionals - people who should be at the forefront of these changes - many seemed uncertain about where to go next with AI. The technology is advancing so rapidly that even the experts are still figuring it out.

This is exactly why Sentry exists. Every industry, every business, is currently being disrupted by AI or will be soon. The businesses that will thrive are those that embrace this transformation with a trusted partner who can guide them through the complexity.

At Sentry, we're not just watching this transformation - we're living it, testing it, and helping our clients navigate it successfully. Personally I'm using multiple AI models at every step of everything I do- we want to lead the way to help your business win.  We understand both the technical possibilities and the business realities. We know how to separate the hype from the practical applications that actually drive results.  We know how to help you step into what's next while keeping your business and your business data safe.

The future belongs to businesses that can harness AI to amplify their human capabilities, not replace them. As Amodei put it perfectly: "AI isn't here to replace us. It's here to replace the parts of our work that don't bring us joy, to handle the repetition so we can focus on the remarkable."

I can't wait to see what's next. The game is changing, and we're here to help you not just play it, but win it.